or, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk

Where The Good Stuff Lives

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About this blog

By Brian Herzog

Hiya. My name is Brian Herzog and I am, among other things, a reference librarian at the Chelmsford Public Library in Chelmsford, MA*, and have been since 2005. I like being a librarian. I've also worked at the Scarborough Public Library in
...

Hiya. My name is Brian Herzog and I am, among other things, a reference librarian at the Chelmsford Public Library in Chelmsford, MA*, and have been since 2005. I like being a librarian. I've also worked at the Scarborough Public Library in Scarborough, Maine, and the Kent State University Library, in Kent, Ohio, which is where I earned my Masters in Library and Information Science. In addition to information science, I also enjoy reading, hiking, kayaking, knitting, biking, traveling, asking my friend Chris to do things for me, and popcorn. I do not enjoy trying new foods, reality television, drama, cell phones, ceremonies, or traffic.
*Swiss Army Librarian is not endorsed by the Chelmsford Library or the Town of Chelmsford. I speak for myself, of my own experiences.

I just got back from an extra-long Labor Day weekend, which of course means my desk had accumulated a variety of items in my absence. Most are fairly routine to deal with, but a few - namely, donations from patrons - sometimes require special tactics.

For regular donations (like books and DVDs), we either add them to the collection or give them to our Friends group for the book sale. But other things, local history items, photographs, old newspapers, and other assorted ephemera, don't fit into an existing slot somewhere in the library, which means a Decision must be made.

In my case, all that stuff (a.k.a. Deferred Decision items) goes under my desk. It occurred to me that it's possible that the best stuff in libraries lives in places like this - and only because we don't know what else to do with it.

So, as an exercise in public shame, I thought I'd share what it looks like under my desk, and explain what's there and why. Here's what is under my desk:

Now, going from left to right:

The tall thin boxes are unassembled acid-free archival boxes, waiting to be used

Next is an assembled archival box, which is my catch-all for any local history item that isn't a book. This currently includes (but is not limited to) a route map for the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail bike path (the white roll on top), old and newish newspapers, unmarked photographs, random notebooks and records, loose yellowing pages from who knows what, and some duplicates of things we have in our Local History Room. Most of these things I found while cleaning out different cabinets in the library and just consolidated here - beyond that, I don't have any idea where most of it came from

The white box is where I keep the current year of our local newspaper - we have a "reference" subscription to the paper, which I send out to be microfilmed after the year is complete. The publisher doesn't provide microfilm copies, so this is the only way we can continue to build a clean filmed copy for our archive

The "tax products" box is something I keep just because it makes me laugh, although I haven't found an actual use for is yet

And finally on the right, this entire box was donated by a patron and is full of magazines, newspapers, and scrapbooks of clippings, all from the 1960s and relating either to the Kennedys or the moon landing

Since we're a public library and not at archive, we really don't have a way to make most of this stuff publicly-available. But I also can't bring myself to just throw it all into the recycling bin.

I've tried to find homes for some of it - I called the JFK Library to see if they'd be interested in the old Kennedy stuff, but they said they have loads of it. Everything else, I just keep telling myself that some day when it's really slow at the desk, I'll go through it all and do something with it. Some day.

Anyway, I'd be curious to hear if anyone else has a treasure trove like this under their desk (or elsewhere). I hope I'm not alone, and I suspect that I'm not.